The Porn Critic

Kromer couldn’t operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a punctuated cylinder operates a player piano. What he knew came mostly from books—Anaïs Nin, William S. Burroughs, “The Hite Report,” stuff gleaned as a teen-ager from his parents’ shelves. Yet, in his current circle of Manhattan friends, who were mostly graduate students and legal proofreaders, Kromer played the role of satyr. The more he protested that it was only a single heroin-laced cigarette that had happened to be placed in his hand, or that his so-called threesome had consisted of scarcely more than heavy petting and a brush with sleep apnea, the more they looked to Kromer as their saint of degeneracy.

Kromer’s reputation had its origin in the parties he was dragged to by a former schoolmate: a raven-haired, baggy-eyed heiress named Greta. Though these parties were invariably disappointing, Greta invariably closed them down. When a host was reduced to switching off lights and hinting that the sofa wasn’t available, Greta took Kromer on her finishing rounds, often in the rain. Kromer worked nights, so the hours didn’t bother him, and he had nothing else to do. Greta’s legacy, a large trust fund she wasn’t permitted to touch until her thirtieth birthday, drove her mad with the determination to die squalorously before she became wealthy. “Hell, I’ve been in three kinds of threesome,” she once told Kromer, her lips tremulous and her eyes fixed on some dreamy distance, in a way that made her look as if she were on the brink of tears or insane laughter, but in fact indicated that she hadn’t slept for two or three days. “With two boys, with two girls, and with a couple. The only kind I can’t ever be in is the kind I’d really like—three men.”

Greta was, in her desultory way, the real thing. The difficulty was an uncoöperative world, slouching through a new propriety under Clinton. Everyone else Greta knew had been molesting their trust funds since prep school. That was the problem—they were responsible to their money, while Greta waged war on hers. Her only privilege was the use of her father’s “man,” a do-anything emissary and delivery person, who always picked up the phone and, astonishingly, would deliver Corner Bistro hamburgers fresh and hot to any downtown dive bar, usually one occupied primarily by pre-op transsexuals, where Greta and Kromer might be hanging out. Greta sometimes needed to borrow the fifty cents to make the call. Kromer, once he’d learned the trick, urged Greta to use this service often, as it would generally put an evening out of its misery, bringing on the sleep Greta badly needed but resisted. Kromer assumed this deliveryman or fixer was really a butler, but the one time he referred to him as Jeeves Greta seemed not to get it.

From Greta’s many aspiring transsexual acquaintances Kromer remained terrified of accepting even a blow job. None of them could have guessed what aura they’d transferred to Kromer. The process was mysterious. A book nerd, a clerk, Kromer sat failing even to drink very much among young blacks in stuffed brassieres who the following day would be late for beauty school or, in some cases, Intro Soc or Psych at Queens College. Their special language—“shemale,” “pre-op”—made them a nerd species, too, Kromer understood. Yet, the next day, attending afternoon breakfasts with his wondering cohort of Ph.D. candidates and proofreaders, Kromer played the part of Rasputin or Gurdjieff, expected to launch foul seductions or even abductions. Perhaps this was a matter of sheer phrenology—the suggestion of something sallow and ominous in Kromer’s jawline and eye sockets.

Renee and Luna, in History at the Graduate Center—Kromer’s names for them were Beautiful Renee and Invisible Luna—practiced the buddy system, never letting themselves be caught alone with him. Kromer learned this fact from their bolder colleague Sarah, who was willing to meet Kromer unaccompanied in Union Square, at least by daylight. The afternoon was bright, pigeons combing mud baked by winter, a scarf keeping Sarah’s mouth hidden. Kromer had been speculating that Sarah might want him herself, when she mentioned Renee and Luna’s policy.

“They shouldn’t be afraid of me.”

“They’re not afraid. They’re dizzy and repulsed. They want to be able to compare notes.”

Notes? Kromer was a hinge between worlds, a glimpser. All he had to offer them was his own notes, not the world itself. This situation he couldn’t make understood.

Nor could Kromer confess that it was Renee, all-but-dissertation on contemporaneous Western representations of the Boxer Rebellion, whom he loved. Renee Liu, who wore turtlenecks and resembled a whippet, her nose a beacon of melancholy, who furrowed her brow and laughed in suspicion of anything Kromer said that was halfway sincere, whose older sister had been at college with Kromer and Greta, and whose tiny Chinese parents Kromer had once therefore seen picking up Renee’s sister and her belongings at her dorm.

Kromer had no idea whether Renee knew this, or whether her sister had told her terrible stories about Kromer’s college years. But he couldn’t interrogate Sarah on the subject, for fear that she might be injured by being overlooked in favor of Renee. What Kromer wanted to injure was the image of himself as debauchery’s emissary. He said nothing. They fled the frozen park for a coffee shop, where Kromer suggested hot chocolate, adding, he hoped, a brushstroke of harmlessness.

Was it Greta and her pre-ops, or the depth of Kromer’s eye sockets? Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preëmpting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.

Sex Machines’ interior and stock had been painstakingly derived from that of a famous San Francisco shop, founded by a sex-positive lesbian collective. In lieu of such a collective, the owner had installed Kromer, transferred from the video-rental outlet, as both manager and night man. Night hours were what counted in this instance. A wizard salesman, Kromer switched on and demonstrated the range of speeds on any number of devices with a shame-dissolving forthrightness. At those moments, he thought of himself as a Conceptual Lesbian, a term he’d invented and never spoken aloud, nor advanced into any coherent definition. Kromer was fairly certain he’d never experienced an erection within the bounds of the shop.

Four things. Pre-ops, eye sockets, Sex Machines, and the state of Kromer’s apartment. Few had been inside, but word evidently got around. Kromer’s boss, whose video store featured “staff picks” shelves with extensive written remarks, had insisted that Sex Machines produce their own version of the San Francisco collective’s newsletter, a hallmark of that store’s unfurtive friendliness. In the newsletter, pornographic movies were extensively categorized, according to predilections and interests, and rated on several indices: number of key scenes, story or its desirable absence, diversity of performer types, et cetera. It seemed that this was the way to sell porn to bored marrieds, a market Kromer’s employer characterized as “Moby Dick.”

Kromer, outed once in conversation as a novice writer, was deputized as the editor of Sex Machines’ newsletter, as well as its sole contributor and reviewer of new materials. His apartment was a maze of stacked porn. The volume was staggering. The disarranged piles melded into a wallpaper of ludicrous font and slashes of pink, brown, and yellow flesh; though the job was chiefly a matter of inventorying characteristics, tabulating spurts and lashings, Kromer couldn’t get through the tapes fast enough. As invisible to him as familiar bookshelves would be to another, the accumulation tended to make a powerful impression on visitors. This Kromer ought to keep in mind, yet didn’t.

It should have been foremost, especially on that in-like-a-lamb evening in March, a month or so after his stroll with Sarah, when Kromer improbably pried Renee and Luna loose from a dull celebration, held at a pub just a few blocks from his building (some underdog had passed his orals, on second attempt). Kromer had brought Greta along, and it was she who actually accomplished the trick, keening for Kromer to lead her back to his apartment, where she knew he had a fresh bag of good pot. “Do you want to get high?” Greta, inserting herself beside Kromer, posed this question flatly to Renee and Luna, whom she’d only just met. Greta’s dress, mascara, and mannerisms in this company made her appear a woman garbed as a bat or a cat at a party where no one else was costumed. She was an instinctive corrupter and seducer, guilty of everything ever imputed to Kromer. Yet he’d never have carried off the extraction himself.

The walk couldn’t have been improved, Luna falling in beside Greta, Renee lagging behind with Kromer, the air nearly balmy. Kromer peppered Renee with teasing questions, even dared express surprise at learning of her sister.

“We must have been at school together. If I tried, I’d remember her.”

“Think of me but better looking. She was a model. Now she’s a model’s agent.”

“Really?”

“Not the famous kind. In catalogues for winter gear, under hot lights. She told me you could lose ten pounds in one session, just mopping sweat.”

“Like a starting pitcher, I’ve heard.” He threw a pretend forkball.

“Completely demeaning work.”

“I’m sure,” he said, ignoring the ominous word, failing at that moment to worry about his association with the demeaning work of removing clothes under hot lights rather than piling them on. “You could be one.”

This drew her furrowed laugh. “Look at this profile. I’m a pig, I’m a dog.”

He held up an “L” of finger and thumb, making the shape of her regal or mournful nose, something he’d practiced alone, imagining fitting his hand to its length. “I’d cast it in gold.” The line came from somewhere, surely, but wasn’t practiced in the least. It startled not only Kromer but Renee, too, enough to spare him the laugh.

“I’ve been wanting to find a way to split you from Luna for so long I can’t say,” he told her. “This little distance of pavement is all I’ve managed.”

Renee watched her feet, and Luna’s and Greta’s, ahead. “There’s always the telephone.”

“I’d heard you two had a party line—was I misinformed?” He hoped the joke wasn’t too antique for her. Their knuckles brushed. Not quite fingers entangling. No one said ouch.

But the walk, that brief elbow of Houston and Ludlow, was done. Their appointment with his baggie of pot commanded they exit the sweet night, in favor of the radiator thud and hiss of his walkup. The super hadn’t yet adjusted the heat to the season, so Kromer balanced blazing pipes with yawning windows. Air so plush at sidewalk level would be like ice coursing through his fourth-story windows. He’d apologize for luring them into a sauna riven with blasts of cool, nothing else.

“If you don’t mind, Senator, I’d like to render the rest of my testimony sotto voce.”Buy the print »

Did Renee glance at the tapes on the bracket shelves, and the tapes stacked in uneven piles on the floorboards beneath the shelves, and the tapes on the shelf above the closet’s hangers, where Kromer put all their coats? Possibly. Kromer caught Invisible Luna’s glances at them. Yet it was Renee’s containment that Kromer should have taken as a sign. She fell silent, her limbs surrendering their animation. If only the blocks of Ludlow had each been a mile long. Greta sat cross-legged on Kromer’s couch and rolled joints with the crafty intensity and patter of a stage magician, so practiced that she could look away from the trick to meet her audience’s eyes.

“Is all this yours?” Luna said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Kromer seized the opportunity with relief. The tapes had first to be mentioned, so as to be dismissed. “I find it pretty incredible myself,” he said. “My mansion of smut has many doors.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Luna said.

Kromer cut the jokes, opting for efficiency. He described the formulaic nature of the reviews, how he’d become adept enough to write one after slogging fifteen or twenty minutes into a given feature, and the logistical annoyance of the VHS cartons stacking up. “You’d never think they could need so much of it, until you see them in the shop, ravenous for new releases. As if watching the same one twice would be the shameful act.” The pronoun “they” was what he meant to put across, a verbal quarantine on the unseen behaviors dividing customer from clerk.

For a few minutes, the subject went underground. The joint circled the room. Kromer was content to see that as it visited under Renee’s elegant nose she sipped deeply, eyes closed. He couldn’t have predicted that it would be a fuse on a stick of dynamite, a spark sizzling its way to Renee’s lips. Or that she’d go off like Yosemite Sam. Kromer was just dropping the needle onto a Cowboy Junkies LP when Renee screeched, “I feel like I’m sitting inside a copy of ‘Guernica’!”

Greta’s eyes widened, which put them at half mast. “More like Francis Bacon,” she murmured. Greta had been an art-history major at college. “Really, if you squint, it’s like we’re in a Bosch painting.”

“ ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’ ” Kromer said. It seemed a calming phrase to utter, akin to saying the words “The Peaceable Kingdom” or “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” or like the narcotic tone of the LP, which presently purred, “Heavenly wine and roses seem to whisper to me when you smile . . .”

“My gender-studies professor did a book of life histories of sex workers,” Renee said. “But it’d take a thousand years to debrief this Aladdin’s cave of contorted bodies.” Renee’s expression was mangled, like her words.

“If these walls could talk, they’d moan,” Greta said.

“I think they might be screaming at me,” Renee said.

“Not everything is . . . the same as everything else.” Kromer recognized that his generalized protest against equivalences wasn’t going to cut much ice. As it happened, Sex Machines’ bookshelf featured Renee’s professor’s book, a fact Kromer didn’t feel obliged to mention.

Renee bolted upright, putting Kromer on alert for a police raid, or a blouse aflame from a loose ember. Instead she darted at the edifice of porn, coming away with three tapes. These she tossed into Kromer’s lap, poisoned potatoes. “Tell us what’s so different.”

Where could he possibly begin? Kromer flashed on the tapes’ contents, helplessly. Actually, Renee had done well, for a random stab. Two of these three had some redeeming imaginative elements. He lifted the topmost, “Bare Miss Apprehension.” “These—I mean, ‘Bare Miss Adventure’ and all the sequels—they’re really just star vehicles for Jocelyn Jeethers. A picaresque structure, but charming. People like them, I mean. There’s a good focus on female autonomy—” Kromer stumbled on the proximity of this word to “anatomy.”

“Autonomy of what?” Renee said.

“Autonomy. . . of pleasure, I guess.” He felt himself whirling down his own motormouthed drain. “Whereas this—” Having shunted the first tape aside, he held the next, “Anal Requiem 4: The Assmaid’s Tale,” exposed in his lap. He hesitated over the terms “low end” and “bottom drawer” before settling on “Junk.”

“Oh, I tallied up the number of certain acts, which is all you’re really dealing with in this case.” He flipped it away. “This, on the other hand, is actually pretty interesting.” The film, called “Social Hormones,” Kromer had stayed with to the end. “The Sward Brothers are renowned for their commitment to establishing character arcs and narrative causality, and production values generally—you can actually watch their stuff more or less like a movie, if not a great one.” He heard quotes from his own newsletter entry. “Of course, there’s a certain ceiling on the quality of the acting.” It struck him, too late, that he was attempting to demonstrate that he wasn’t a man from the moon by detailing the moon’s topology, cataloguing its hollows.

“Let’s watch it!” Greta said.

“Or not,” Renee said. She looked ill. All glanced involuntarily at Kromer’s large black television, stacked with the VCR on its rolling cart. “Is it just me,” Renee continued, “or are the walls getting closer?”

The suggestion’s power was tremendous. Kromer, though eager for a subject on which to agree with Renee, thought better of saying he’d noticed it, too. “I really should clear some of this out—”

“You could just brick up the windows,” Luna mused. “It’s like a gothic nightmare, what’s it called—‘The Prisoner of the Rue Morgue’?”

“By Edgar Allan Porn!” Greta shrieked.

Renee jolted from her chair a second time, now veering to the room’s shrinking center, avoiding the looming shelves. She pitched, bent double, attempting a vomity dash for Kromer’s bathroom. She nearly made it. The vision she’d offered earlier—the pig, the dog—now came fully into view, though Kromer felt anything but unsympathetic. She brushed him off, after he’d gained a brief, delicious sensation of her long knobbed spine beneath his fingers, and staggered to the toilet to finish her heaves. Kromer’s special literacy was, it now seemed, something worse than a complete dead loss on the human scoreboard. It was positively toxic, able to compel vomit from gorgeous women. He thought with relief how, on her knees, at least, Renee would be spared any view of the VHS tapes stacked on the porcelain tank.

Kromer labored at the floorboards with wadded paper towel and citrus solvent, wishing to spare her, too, the shame of her stinky action painting. He glanced over to see Luna and Greta side by side on the couch, charting his efforts with amusement, Greta’s short fingers meandering on Luna’s archer’s-bow thigh. Behind him, the apartment door slammed.

The permanent mystery was how much you seemed to know before you knew anything at all. Or maybe the permanent mystery was how stupid you could be and yet how you clung to evidence that your stupidity knew things you didn’t. Kromer, just for instance, had named her Invisible Luna without grasping that it was he, Kromer, who was invisible to Luna. She was, he saw now, a pining, tentative lesbian, in love with her best friend.

Kromer’s Conceptual Lesbianism had come with no gaydar. He’d kept Luna blurred in his periphery as a defense against how little he signified, but also for fear of understanding his small role: arousing but creepy, Kromer could keep Renee in a state of prurient susceptibility, yet repulsed by the male prospect. For Kromer and Luna had shared the same quarry, she who’d puked and vamoosed. Kromer’s pointless reputation had once again run his tender hopes into the dust. As for Luna’s hopes, who knew? Kromer had overplayed his role, or his apartment had.

Likely neither had stood a chance with Renee. Of such stuff booby prizes are made. Invisible Luna’s breasts, fully visible now in the street-light glow leaking in through Kromer’s bedroom windows, were lovely to touch. Kromer was left alone with them while Luna submitted herself to Greta’s actions, lower down. The air was mingled sweat and smoke and vomit, the hour unknown. Needle bumping to the label, at groove’s end again. It was all good, it was fine, it was O.K., though Kromer had missed dinner, and felt hungry. For hours he’d been rising from the futon to change the record, knowing he was the inessential factor, never certain he’d be welcomed back when he returned. But the prospect of the exotic thing you’d recall forever, the alluring taint of a sophistication you’d never quite scrub off, kept Kromer’s small place open for him, so long as he knew better than to remove his pants. Now he felt too lazy to change the record.

Kromer was once more a conduit, a proprietor. He might as well have been at the counter of Sex Machines, his life a site where others came to test their readiness for what they feared were their disallowed yearnings. Whether that left room enough for Kromer’s own yearnings remained unclear. In the meantime, Kromer was the kind of good egg who’d do his best to make certain Luna never knew what kind of threesome Greta truly wished she could submit to. No one would ever understand the little sensitivities that went into making Kromer’s sort of sleazeball.

When Luna was gratified, exhausting herself on the horizon of her own possibilities, she gathered up underwear and reassembled herself with a certain horror in her eyes, then followed Renee’s path and fled the apartment, leaving Kromer and Greta alone together on the futon. It was the sort of foggy finish they’d given to plenty of evenings, though never before minus Greta’s outfit, and parts of Kromer’s. Greta, enemy of sleep, rolled another joint. Kromer put on another record, got back into bed. Greta unbuttoned his jeans.

“It’s O.K.,” Kromer said. Maybe this was what he and Greta had in common. As opposed to oblivious solid citizens like Luna, Greta was another good-egg sleazeball, who’d worry that Kromer hadn’t gotten a release of his own.

“No,” Greta said, trashing his theory. “I want a dick in me now.”

Not Kromer’s in particular; this was just Greta’s characteristic honesty. Kromer felt he had a bargaining position, for once. “I demand Barney Greengrass. A whole smoked-fish plate, with plenty of bagels. Sable and sturgeon, and chopped liver, too. Call your dad’s guy.”

“They’re not open—it’s the middle of the night.”

“They’ll be open in an hour or two.” He stilled her hand with his own. “Call the guy first, set it up. Coffee and orange juice, the whole thing.”

Greta sighed, then picked up Kromer’s phone and did as he’d asked. Then she took off his pants. Kromer thought, Now I’ve added prostitution to my roll call of glamorous crimes. I fucked for sturgeon. But no, that would be playing the game by their rules. Kromer knew better than ever his wearisome sacred truth, which no one, perhaps not even Greta, could see: he was innocent. ♦